The Film Group was a Chicago-based production company founded in 1965. In the late 1960s, while anti-war and racial justice movements grew to prominence in Chicago, Mike Gray, a founder of the Film Group, was shooting a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Seeing the police violence on the streets, Gray and his crew decided to turn their cameras on the protests. Over the next few years, the group produced the award-winning documentary features American Revolution 2 (1969) and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).
Using footage shot for the earlier film and additional material of the Chicago Black Panthers, a 1966 civil rights march and the protests and police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Film Group produced the seven-part series of documentary shorts, “The Urban Crisis and the New Militants,” released in 1969. The Film Group intended the series to “teach by raising questions rather than by attempting to answer them.”
Social Confrontation: The Battle of Michigan Avenue begins with tanks and military officials in gas masks interrogating a group of unarmed young people holding a peace sign sitting in a car driven by an older white woman, trying to make their way out of a protest site. The camera captures protestors being beaten, dragged and packed into vans as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley swears at those inside the convention center who raise concerns over the ongoing violence.
